Photo courtesy of Wendy Lee
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About Gone to Drift
Diana has completed her third novel, now entitled Gone to Drift. Built on her 2012 Regional Commonwealth Writers prizewinning short story and originally entitled The Dolphin Catchers, this new novel won second prize for CODE's Burt Award for Caribbean Literature in 2015, which recognizes outstanding literary works for young adults written by Caribbean authors. Gone to Drift was published in February 2016 by Papillote Press in Dominica. Gone to Drift tells the story of a boy’s search for his grandfather who is lost at sea. Lloyd is a 12-year-old Jamaican boy, descended from many generations of fishermen. His beloved grandfather, Maas Conrad, is lost at sea, last seen at a group of remote islands off the south coast of Jamaica called the Pedro Cays. Lloyd suspects that his father, Vernon, is implicated in Maas Conrad’s disappearance. He meets Jules, a young scientist studying dolphins in Jamaican waters and she helps with his search. As Lloyd tries to find out the truth about his grandfather’s disappearance, he confronts the complexity of his relationship with his father and mother and faces choices about his own future. Deeply grounded in place and the lure of the sea for a boy leaving childhood, Gone to Drift explores fundamental choices facing Jamaican society and many developing countries: the casting away of traditional knowledge in the embracing of fast changing modernity, the challenges of surviving in an economy mired in debt and unemployment, and the pressures of an unequal society that pushed people into daily acts of compromise, corruption and even murder. |
Excerpt from Gone to Drift:
Why had his grandfather gone to the Pedro Bank? He was not a Pedro fisher. A man had to motor almost sixty nautical miles to find the Pedro Bank, sixty miles in an open boat, with no navigational equipment, no radio; just eyes and experience and stamina. Maas Conrad was not short of the skills needed, but for some reason he never went to Pedro. He hunted instead for the deep water fish at Bowditch and the California banks and all along the edge of Jamaica’s continental shelf. There were few fish inshore these days. Of course there were the fishers who cast their lines and nets close to the old sewage pipes emptying into Kingston Harbor, where the seabirds hovered and plunged, where the garbage from the gullies floated, and they did catch fish, but Lloyd’s grandfather was not one of those men. Nor was he one of the men who sold fish to the women vendors who used burial fluids to make the fish look fresh. He was not one to throw a bag of chlorine in a good fishing spot and watch the fish float up, nor one to buy dynamite from the police and make his own circle of destruction in the sea. No one had to tell Maas Conrad when lobster season closed, or that Queen conch never lived where there were shattered conch shells on the floor of the sea, or that parrot fish should be left to graze the reef.
Why had his grandfather gone to the Pedro Bank? He was not a Pedro fisher. A man had to motor almost sixty nautical miles to find the Pedro Bank, sixty miles in an open boat, with no navigational equipment, no radio; just eyes and experience and stamina. Maas Conrad was not short of the skills needed, but for some reason he never went to Pedro. He hunted instead for the deep water fish at Bowditch and the California banks and all along the edge of Jamaica’s continental shelf. There were few fish inshore these days. Of course there were the fishers who cast their lines and nets close to the old sewage pipes emptying into Kingston Harbor, where the seabirds hovered and plunged, where the garbage from the gullies floated, and they did catch fish, but Lloyd’s grandfather was not one of those men. Nor was he one of the men who sold fish to the women vendors who used burial fluids to make the fish look fresh. He was not one to throw a bag of chlorine in a good fishing spot and watch the fish float up, nor one to buy dynamite from the police and make his own circle of destruction in the sea. No one had to tell Maas Conrad when lobster season closed, or that Queen conch never lived where there were shattered conch shells on the floor of the sea, or that parrot fish should be left to graze the reef.
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